News and Events

It’s time we stop pretending. Oh, I know it’s easier to sleep when we think that we’re safe and sound. We try to use only “trusted” apps and services. We choose who gets to keep our photos, our files, and our tax returns. We see the lock icon that indicates HTTPS, and we think we can buy shoes safely. But each of the services we choose, and labor over, and discuss, and investigate — they are all only as strong as the dumb password we put in front of them. Let’s just assume every password has been compromised. No account…

Google Apps for Work is quite a popular choice amongst the small businesses and younger companies that are born in the cloud. However, Google is pushing the envelope further to make its way into larger enterprises with their initiative “Google for Work.” Well, there’s good news — Centrify has the solutions to help with the adoption of Google Apps for Work in mid to large enterprises. Before we go any further, let’s take a look at Google Apps for Work adoption numbers published by Google: More than one million paying organizations are actively using Google Drive, including companies like The New York Times, Uber,…

Implementing and maintaining sufficient security for an organisation’s computer network is a timely, costly and ever evolving issue. Much can be done to ensure both the restriction of physical access to an organisation’s hardware and, more significantly, remote access to its computer systems. There are various ways to help ensure that those who shouldn’t have access are kept out, but how do you prevent an attack from someone who’s left the organisation and may still have access to information that you are unaware of? Taking the keys with them There’s a danger that when an employee leaves an organisation they take…

I caught up on Mr. Robot this weekend — in the show, hacker Elliot Alderson works with a Chinese hacker to hack the world’s largest corporation. While watching, I tried to understand how the recent agreement between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping to prevent cyberattacks on each other will make a difference? Mr. Robot, for those you have not seen it, is a hacker drama that follows Elliot Alderson, a security engineer who works for a cybersecurity firm. Elliot has all sorts of social problems — so he connects with people by hacking them and tries his best…

It’s Halloween time, which means new candy from Google in the form of Android 6, and a few new Nexus devices (this time with fingerprint readers). The mobile team at Centrify has also been hard at work on some really great features — some of which work to manage and secure some of the fancy new capabilities of the new Android devices. It’s all in the hands In the November release, we will have full support for the new native fingerprint readers that should become ubiquitous on Android devices over the coming year. Google is banking on this fingerprint technology being…

Enterprise customers are finding value in deploying Chromebooks, and it can be seen from the Gartner forecast on the Chromebook adoption worldwide (below). Some of the early adopters include Netflix, Starbucks and Sanmina — because of their security, simplicity and ability to integrate into existing technology and infrastructure. As more enterprises adopt these endpoints, one important consideration for IT is handling identity management for Chromebooks. One of the comments from Isabelle Durand, principal analyst at Gartner, stuck a chord with me: “By adopting Chromebooks and cloud computing, businesses can benefit; they can shift their focus from managing devices to managing something much more important —…

A few weeks ago the spouse and I learned of an identity theft — our own. We received a notice from the Internal Revenue Service. It said that someone had filed a false return in our names, in an attempt to steal our tax refund. I’m glad IRS flagged the return and sent us a letter. But everyone’s favorite government agency has had to learn its vigilance the hard way. In 2013, it paid out $5.2 billion in fraudulent identity theft tax refunds. The IRS breach is a product of a much bigger problem: large-scale data breaches involving identity and…

It’s been quite a busy year in the cloud computing world. It seems that every week, a relatively young cloud-focused company scores a funding round with a valuation above $1B (unicorns!), and every week we see a traditional enterprise-focused software vendor introduce a new cloud-based service. Each firm will provide different numbers, but the consensus is that spend on cloud computing services is growing significantly, and when compared to the rest of Enterprise IT spend, spend on cloud services is growing at a much faster clip. Diving a bit deeper, the mix of services is changing dramatically. Earlier this year,…

With Pope Francis’ recent visit to the U.S., I was struck by how similar the challenges faced by the Pontiff’s Security Team are to those in enterprise IT today. Whether physical or cyber, security teams must protect their people from the threats against them. Let’s take a look first at why the challenges of protecting the Pope are, in fact, like those of protecting users from cyberthreats. In both cases, it starts with the physical boundaries in which these actors do their jobs. A little over twenty years ago, work for the most part was done in one place — at…

I read with great irritation last weekend of the Experian / T-Mobile hack. I just bought a new iPhone from T-Mobile and as part of the lease process, they ran a credit check with Experian. Immediate thoughts were of unauthorized credit card transactions, canceled cards. Identity theft. Inconvenience and the sense of violation from a “trusted” 3rd party, Experian. Relief when I checked my email receipt from T-Mobile, dated September 18th, as the compromised data window ended on September 16th. But it could have been a couple of days earlier as I’d been thinking about switching from Android for a while….

Centrify CEO Tom Kemp, an industry expert in security and infrastructure software, discusses market and technology issues around the disruption occurring in the Identity and Access Management market due to the cloud, mobile and consumerization of IT trends occurring in today's IT environment.